You Walk Straight Toward It

The thing towers before you—its mass spilling across the path, an oil-slick shadow against the silver ash light. You keep walking. Your feet drag, your knees ache, your breath rasps in and out of your lungs like a saw blade catching on wet wood, but you keep walking. The ground beneath you seems to darken as you near it, not just from its presence but from some unspoken authority it casts over the air itself.

You have been prey too long. Stalked, haunted, toyed with. Your ribs still ache from old bruises, your skin still itches with the memory of too many foreign hands, claws, tendrils. The fear has burned away into something uglier—an ember of rage and resignation.

When you are close enough to smell it—a damp rot mixed with the metallic tang of rust—you do not slow. You don’t sidestep. You don’t tremble. You clench your hands into fists and lunge.

Your fingers tear into its yielding flesh—if flesh is even the right word for the waxy, pliant stuff that gives way under your nails. It’s cold and wet, but strangely dry inside, like punching into a sack of clay. You rip and pull, tearing away chunks, hurling them to the ground where they dissolve into sludge that seeps into the dirt. The air fills with a smell like wet leaves rotting in a stagnant pond.

It makes no sound.

You scream at it—wordless, guttural. Your fists slam against it. You rake your nails through it. Every strike carves away a piece, but the damage doesn’t stay. The edges of its wounds quiver, draw in, and re-knit with a slow, obscene patience. Chunks you tear free crumble into strings and slide back toward its body, reabsorbed before they can touch the ground.

It is like trying to kill the tide.

The thing bends, folding itself down toward you, until its faceless head hangs just above yours. Its neck—or the long column where a neck would be—is fluid, sinew stretching and compressing with no bones beneath. That blank oval hovers in the air before you, impossibly close.

You feel it studying you. Not seeing, not smelling, but something deeper. You can’t look away, though there is nothing to meet your gaze.

Your breath comes harder now. You feel the sweat run down your back. You keep hitting it anyway, even as your arms burn and your wrists throb from the strain. But each blow lands softer. Slower. Until your fists just press against it, sliding down the smooth, shifting surface.

And then you stop.

You sag against it—not in surrender exactly, but in a strange, hollowed-out exhaustion. The kind that strips away even the idea of victory or defeat. Your head drops forward and rests against its not-skin. It doesn’t move away. It doesn’t strike you down.

It supports you.

The realization twists in your chest like a splinter of bone—this monster, this faceless thing, holding your weight when you no longer can. You feel so small against it. Insignificant. A smudge of life clinging to something older, something infinite.

Your breathing slows. You feel its surface flexing slightly beneath you, as though it were breathing in return, syncing with your rhythm.

You stand there for a long time—too long—leaning into the impossible weight and texture of it, the way one might lean into a wall in the dark just to know something solid is still there. But the solidity is an illusion. Beneath the slow, steady flex of its body, there’s a suggestion of endless depth, like you could push your arm inside and keep going until your shoulder vanished.

Finally, your legs remind you they cannot keep you here. You peel yourself away, leaving a faint stickiness on your shirt where its surface clung to you for a heartbeat too long. The creature does not try to hold you. It just stands there, head tilting in the barest inclination, as if acknowledging your choice.

You turn back toward the road. You keep walking.

The sound of it following is almost nothing—just a faint, viscous whisper, like wet paper dragged across stone. But it’s always exactly one step behind your shadow. When you pause to glance back, there it is: impossibly still, that featureless face leveled toward you.

The air feels heavier now. Not with the stink of it, though that clings to you like smoke, but with its presence—an invisible weight pressing on your skin, seeping under it.

The road winds on through skeletal trees, their bark split and curling like scorched parchment. The ground is a patchwork of dry mud and ash, each step sending up pale motes that vanish before they touch the thing behind you. The world is silent but for your own footsteps and that subtle, unnatural sound of its pursuit.

You try to ignore it. You try to fix your eyes on the horizon where the land folds into itself, gray upon gray. But there’s no escaping the sensation of being… tethered. As if an invisible thread stretches from your spine into the blank oval where its face should be. You imagine it can feel your pulse through that connection, each heartbeat a ripple through the unseen cord.

Somewhere along the road, the smell changes. Less rot now, more of something metallic, sharp—like lightning just before it strikes. The hair on your arms prickles. You realize the trees have thinned, replaced by low, mounded shapes scattered across the ground.

They’re bodies.

Not fresh—most have sunk into themselves, ribs curling inward, skin stretched taut over bone in some places and peeling away in others. But they’re not corpses the way you’ve seen before. They look… pressed. Flattened, as though some massive hand had lain over them and simply absorbed their final moments, leaving the shapes behind like stains in fabric.

You glance over your shoulder. The creature has stopped.

It stands at the edge of the clearing, unmoving, head slightly cocked. You can’t tell if it’s watching you or the field of remains.

“Do you know them?” you hear yourself whisper.

The wind—or what passes for it here—shifts. The metallic tang grows stronger. You realize the mounded shapes aren’t still after all. Some of them quiver faintly, as if stirred from within by slow, deliberate movement.

Your stomach turns, but you keep moving. You step between the remains, careful not to touch them, though your boots sink slightly into the ground each time you land. The earth is soft here—too soft.

You’re halfway across when you hear it.

A wet, stretching sound behind you.

You turn. The creature is crossing the field now. Only, it’s not walking. Its lower half is… gone. Or rather, it has poured itself outward, spreading across the ground in a slow, flowing mass, slipping over and around the mounds without disturbing them. Each place it touches darkens, as though it’s drinking the color from the world.

And as it moves, the quivering mounds still around you… stop.

You freeze until it reaches your side, its surface rising up again, re-forming the shape you know. No face. No eyes. But the sense of attention—immense, deliberate—presses on you like the weight of the sky.

It moves ahead of you now, taking the lead on the road. Its shape shifts as it goes, shoulders narrowing, back elongating, until it’s less a figure and more a flowing pillar that coils and uncoils in rhythm with your steps.

You don’t question it. You just follow.

Hours—or minutes, time feels strange—pass before the terrain changes again. The trees return, but they’re not dead this time. They’re worse.

Their bark pulses faintly, like the skin of something alive. You see thin seams running vertically up their trunks, flexing open and closed, releasing faint drafts of warm, damp air. Some seams split wider as you pass, and deep within, you glimpse slick shapes shifting in the darkness—limbs or roots, it’s impossible to tell.

The creature stops beside one, its surface flowing upward to press against the seam. For a moment, you think it’s trying to slip inside, but then you realize—it’s feeding.

The seam widens under its touch, sap—or blood—seeping out in thick strands, drawn immediately into the creature’s body. The tree shudders under the contact.

You should be horrified. You are horrified. But you’re also… jealous. That effortless taking. That certainty of belonging in this rotting world.

When it’s done, it returns to your side, a faint ripple running through its form, as if satisfied.

You walk again, silent. And it stays beside you now, close enough that your arm occasionally brushes against the shifting cold of its surface.

At first you flinch each time, but after a while, you don’t.

The road ahead is endless, the sky a blank smear of ash light, but you keep moving, the two of you bound together by something deeper than choice.

And in the stillness between steps, you wonder if you were ever truly alone before it found you.